


Miss You Like a Home

by zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Series: Miss You Like a Home [1]
Category: Matthias & Maxime (2019)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, COVID-19, Childhood Friends, Dystopia, Friends to Lovers, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Je Me Souviens, M/M, Masturbation, Misogyny, Phone Sex, Pining, Racism, Toxic Masculinity, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:49:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26311420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: “It’s not a big deal,” Max says. He sounds cheerful. In the background, Matt hears music, voices, and gulls. “Remember SARS? I don’t.”*Matthias and Maxime navigate lockdown.
Relationships: Matthias Ruiz/McAfee, Maxime Leduc/Matthias Ruiz
Series: Miss You Like a Home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932901
Comments: 33
Kudos: 69





	Miss You Like a Home

**Author's Note:**

> I am a copycat. As usual, [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite) started it. (I listened to “[Song for Zula](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcdOLKx2XG8&ab_channel=DeadOceans)” on repeat while writing this.) 
> 
> I have a lot of thoughts about the Victoria/Melbourne lockdowns, and lockdowns in general, namely that they are shortsighted, authoritarian, and bad. Come at me bro. Or read Carlo Caduff’s [What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop](https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maq.12599) (21 July 2020). “What makes this pandemic unprecedented is not the virus but the response to it…. The lockdown is a political mechanism not simply for the prevention but for the redistribution of negative effects. Lockdowns shift negative effects away from hotspots of public attention to places where they are less visible and presumably less serious. In this way, they are part and parcel of a politics of inequality.”

__

Edward Hopper (b.1882) - _Sun in an Empty Room._ 1963\. Oil on canvas

_Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me._

—Allen Ginsburg to Peter Orlovsky

The world changed when Max left. Even before the first inklings of panic, it had changed. Frank drove him home from the airport: in silence, at first, Frank’s hands tight on the wheel and his own hands curled uselessly in his lap, neither of them acknowledging the emptiness in the back seat, the new and sudden absence; then Frank had reached over and flicked on the radio. Music poured over them, then ads. Under the stranglehold of his seatbelt he felt the newborn tenderness of his skin. Everything new. Everything strange. And Max wasn’t even in the air yet, he thought; he was probably just clearing security, his backpack heavy on his shoulder.

Back in the Plateau, he and Frank had grunted at each other in farewell. “Take care,” Frank said, as though Matt was the one flying to the other side of the planet.

Like Frank’s tires purring down the black road, the weeks started to speed up, blurring over and into themselves. He welcomed that speed, encouraged it; it was going to bring Max back to him. At work, they finalized his promotion. At home, Sarah told him she wasn’t sure this was going to work out.

“You’ve been distant,” she said, “you’ve been moody, you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I love you.” That week, he was already in the doghouse because he’d missed another dinner party of hers, with the neighbors whose names he hadn’t bothered to learn. He’d been working late with McAfee. Working late for a client, he’d told her. A tricky arbitration, the most complicated thing I’ve ever handled, Sarah, if we can pull this off…. But actually he and McAfee had been at Cléopatra; in the bathroom at Cléopatra, his shoes and knees sticking to the old piss and beer on the floor, his mouth stretched around McAfee’s dick, and McAfee’s hands in his hair, pushing him down brutally hard, making him choke and drool. He had enough trouble understanding McAfee at the office, when all he had to contend with was the drone of the HVAC; over the pounding electronica and his own gargling all he could make out was, _Yeah, fuck yeah, you love it._ Afterward, he’d checked himself neurotically in the mirror: his lips, his face, his collar, looking for stains.

“I love you,” Sarah said, and he thought she was saying it back to him, reflexively, but all she was doing was repeating his words. “I love you,” she said again, “I love you, that’s all you ever say. You say it, Matt, but you don’t show it. I’m going to my sister’s.”

 _You wanna…?_ McAfee had said, making an obscene pumping motion behind him. His reflection was unsmiling but relaxed, his cheeks still flushed. He was like porcelain, normally; after getting off, he was angelic, ready to return the favor. It was what bros did, what McAfee did, in the showers with his buddies on the lacrosse team at U of T. Not _my_ bros, Matt had thought, remembering how Frank had hugged them, himself and Max, on the curb outside the international terminal, his hair smelling like vanilla.

He’d shaken his head. _Got to go._

 _Got your sweet piece of ass waiting at home, nice._ Another obscene gesture and a shrug. Back to the booth for McAfee, singles in his pocket.

Matt had ducked out into the night, jacketless, grateful that Sarah’s friends were the type who wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Cléopatra. His lips were tingling but he was flaccid, his dick was asleep in his briefs like some kind of pathetic animal entering hibernation. He’d been sucking McAfee off for weeks and had yet to take him up on his offer; he was afraid of McAfee’s grip. Max wouldn’t do that to me, he thought, wouldn’t hold my head like he was trying to crush it. Wouldn’t gasp _Oh yeah_ like he was scoring goals. Max would be so much gentler than I deserve.

Sarah comes back. She loves him. He loves her. He’s sorry, he’ll do better: for her, for them. It’s October. He meets McAfee’s fiancée. It’s November. CCAC decides in their client’s favor. It’s December. Max decides to stay in Melbourne.

He hears the news from Rivette. It’s Friday. Another dinner party; another snowy night.

It takes what feels like an age to steady himself. “What do you mean, stay?” he says.

“ _Caliss_ ,” Rivette says, gesturing eloquently at the window, “would you want to come back to this? If you didn’t have to?”

This: family and friends gathered together, under softly gleaming yellow lights, cozy against the storm and the misfortunes of Friday the Thirteenth, their bellies full of wine. All of their mothers are here, with the obvious exception of Manon Leduc; his mother and Rivette’s mother and Frank’s and Brass’s, all of them in the living room, in their gaudy holiday best, laughing like crows. They have taken the kitchen, they, the gang, the childhood friends. Rivette and Frank have left a space between them, a space for Max, as though he’s dead. As though he’s fucking dead.

And Rivette says, “Didn’t you know?”

I don’t know anything, he thinks. I thought I did, I thought I understood when Max put his hand on top of my hand in the back seat of Frank’s car and kept it there all the way to the airport, light, butterfly-light, almost hovering; when he took it away and smiled at me I thought I understood. That between us, no words were necessary, only touch. That he had decided to come back sooner rather than later. That he would be home for Christmas after all. For me.

“Shariff’s?” Brass proposes.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Ah, the married man,” Rivette says. “Of course. We who are sad bachelors salute you.”

Frank: “Speak for yourself, nothing sad about me.”

They call him the married man now—Rivette started it—they call him that, but he hasn’t proposed. He saw Sarah’s glance at the ring on the finger of McAfee’s fiancée, at their firm's Thanksgiving dinner, glittering as she passed the potatoes. (The fiancée’s name is Molly. A strawberry blonde with beautiful eyes and a mother high up in the Ontario provincial government. He can’t imagine McAfee doing anything rough with her. He can’t imagine McAfee doing anything with her at all.)

He hasn’t proposed, and when Sarah comes to pick him up, he doesn’t get in the car. Erika is in New York, the boys have driven off, the mothers have gone home; the windows of the house are dark. He stands on the sidewalk with Rivette’s iron gate at his back and snow in his hair and says, “Sarah, I love you—I love you, but I can’t do this.”

She puts the car in park and takes her hands off the wheel. “Get in.”

He does and sees that she’s wearing penguin pajama bottoms. His heart seizes. He puts his forehead on the dash and says, “Fuck.” Says it in the Quebecois way: _tabarnak_ and not _putain_.

“Is it Max or McAfee?” she says.

“What?”

“Well?” When he lifts his head to look at her, he sees the streetlights reflected in her eyes, ready to spill over. Her voice is calm, but her lips are trembling. “If you’re going to break up with me, do it like a man, look at me, don’t you dare lie to me again. When my mother asks why I came to her house alone for Christmas, I want to give her a reason.”

“You’re going to out me to your mother?”

“Why shouldn’t I? There’s nothing wrong with _me_.”

“Fuck, Sarah,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with me either. I’m not gay. I’m not.”

“Bullshit.” A hiss. “I know about McAfee.”

He stares. “What—”

“I _know_ ,” she snaps. The tears are falling now, one after another, rolling down her cheeks, shining. She stares straight ahead. “You were working late again. I thought I’d surprise you. Bring you dinner. I bought pho. From that place you like.”

“Sarah.”

“It was the eighteenth of October. The security guard let me in. I took the second elevator. It was dark. I heard noises. I saw you— _I saw you_ —I saw you through the glass.”

“Sarah—”

“My Matt,” Sarah says, “taking it up the ass.”

“Sarah, you didn’t say _anything_ ,” he says. “Sarah—Sarah—it’s been _months_.”

“Because I loved you,” Sarah says. “Because I thought we could make it work. After Max left—”

His voice swells. “Don’t fucking bring Max into this.”

Sarah goes rigid. She bites her lip. Then she screams at him. “I’ll do whatever I want.” She beats the steering wheel with her palms. “I’ll do whatever I want because that’s what you’ve always done, you emotionally constipated son of a fucking bitch. It’s over. Get out, _decriss_ , get out!”

She doesn’t drive off; she stays inside, crying, doubled over the wheel, ignoring him as he taps timidly on the window and then pounds on it. He gives up—too quickly, he thinks, unforgivably quickly—and hurries down the street, where he hails an Uber. He lets himself into his mother’s house with the key she keeps taped to a flowerpot and goes to sleep on the couch.

He’s afraid to go pack up his shit. And he has no one he can ask to help him. The boys will stage an intervention. McAfee will laugh at him. Maybe offer a hand job as consolation. But it turns out he didn’t have to worry: when he returns to the apartment on Sunday, wincing, dragging his feet, Sarah is out. He leaves her a check that will cover January’s rent and gathers his things.

There isn’t much, in the end: his suits, his shoes, his cufflinks, a guitar, a few books. He lived lightly, he realizes; he never put down roots. He was always ready to run.

He used to go to France every August with his mother—one whole month, dividing their time between Paris and Carcassonne—until he was fifteen and his grandmother died and Rivette inserted himself into their group of friends, winning their affections with his summer house and its ten rooms and piano and drumkit and private dock. He’s never thought about what Max was doing in those summers, those weeks when he was swimming in the Salz and eating his grandmother’s briny olive tapenade, but he wonders now. He wonders if Max missed him like this, the way he’s missing Max: not quite like a hole in his body but like an uncomfortable wrongness, a twinge between his shoulders bordering on muscle strain. He wonders if Max also experienced the curious sensation that nothing was real, that he was sleepwalking until Matt came back and until then all the colors of the world would be muted. Then again, winter in Montreal, well. By the laws of nature the world is gray and white and speckled with gravel and pigeon shit. He sleeps through his mother’s New Year’s Eve party. He wants to sleep until Max comes home, but he no longer understands when that will be, if it will ever happen. Max has a nice phone now, he hears from Brass, all that bartending money; he has an Instagram and uses it to post pictures of people Matt will never meet.

He asks McAfee, “What does it mean when someone moves away?”

“It means she doesn’t wanna see your face, man,” McAfee says. “Means she’s sick of you. But I thought she made that amply clear when she dumped your ass.” He claps Matt on the shoulder. “Forget her, dude, she was a bitch anyway.”

This is without a doubt one of the nicest things McAfee has ever said to him. He meets McAfee’s eyes. Sky blue and clear, without an ounce of malice. This is just the way of the world, McAfee’s expression says. Men are dogs, so women are bitches; I fuck therefore I am.

“You ever have someone,” he asks, “before Molly?”

McAfee looks uninterested. “Yeah, of course, dude,” he says. “Fuckton of chicks.”

“Someone special.” He doesn’t say: a man.

He already knows McAfee isn’t going to tell him the truth. McAfee says, without hesitation, “Yeah, this girl, Jennifer. Tenth grade trig. Oh, she was special. For sure special. She was _stacked_. I love Molly, man, but you can’t deny she’s as flat as a fucking board. She’s almost fucking concave. You know? Mm, yeah, Jenny. Jennifer Laurel Wells.” His blue eyes cloud over and Matt knows he’s thinking of her, Jennifer, and the closet he got to grope her in, and the softness of her body under his hands.

His new apartment is in Mile End, but he almost never sleeps there; he sleeps at the office, pulling twelve-hour days. So the news out of China barely brushes the corners of his mind, and when his mother frets at him via text, he ignores her. Work, always work, I’m busy at work. Between meetings and memos, he remembers McAfee’s snort: “Shee-yit. No more pho for us, huh, Ruiz.” _Foe. Roo-eez._ McAfee pronounces his last name like every Anglophone, his teeth dragging against the Z, buzzing.

February: creeping horror. He reads the news about Wuhan and the cruise ships. Chinatown is far from deserted, but there’s new graffiti in an alleyway along De La Gauchetière, so searingly hateful he feels it should sizzle off the walls. He gets Max’s new number from Rivette, after pretending to have lost his phone, going so far as to text Rivette from his mother’s cell. Before he went crawling to Rivette, he tried his father, but Ronaldo Ruiz hasn’t laid eyes on Max since 2002, doesn’t have his number, wouldn’t recognize him now. Birthmark or no birthmark. He calls Max and tells him to come back.

“It’s not a big deal,” Max says. He sounds cheerful. In the background, Matt hears music, voices, and gulls. “Remember SARS? I don’t.”

Because we were kids, he wants to say. We were kids and we were never going to die. It’s 8:15 in Montreal and the grown-ups are streaming into the lobby of his glass tower with slush on their boots. He nods good morning at a woman wearing a Stikeman Elliott badge and says, “Well, how is everything? Over there?”

“Fine,” Max says. “Beautiful. Listen, I have to go. My break’s over.”

“Okay. Later.”

“Later, Matt.”

When he hangs up, his chest feels tight. It only seems to get tighter as the week progresses, and on the first Tuesday of March he convinces his doctor to prescribe him an X-ray. It comes back clear, which relieves the pressure for all of sixty minutes. By that evening, he’s coughing, but his doctor, his friends, even his mother, agree it’s probably bronchitis. He works from home just to be safe, coughing and reading news from Italy, and ends up spending the next two weeks in bed, hacking phlegm into tissues, down the sink, in one instance into his open hand, grimacing; missing Sarah, who would have made him soup if she’d been there. His mother brings him meals in Tupperware containers and leaves them outside his door.

A day after he finally starts to feel better, the world shuts down. Country by country, region by region. Lombardy. Italy, France, Spain. Quebec. Australia follows two days later.

Frank starts a group chat. At first there was nothing, but now they’re texting nonstop, sitting in their respective homes and apartments.

 _Guess I won’t be back for Easter_ , Max says. Matt reads this message over and over again. The perfect punctuation, the formality. Is he joking? Is he scared? He calls but Max doesn’t pick up.

 _Fucking bastard who gets to be locked down in paradise_ , Rivette says.

 _Go fuck yourself,_ Max says. _I live in a closet you can go on a whole-ass vacation in the east wing of your house, go fuck yourself rivette in the east wing._

The first case in Montreal followed a woman home from Iran in late February. By the time they lock down, it’s already too late: the virus is everywhere; every symptom is suspect. His mother never coughs but runs a fever for three days. Brass shits his brains out but insists it’s food poisoning. (But, he admits, he can’t smell for shit. _Correction_ , Matt writes, _all you can smell is shit._ ) A colleague spends a day in the emergency room only to be sent home. Shariff moves in with his girlfriend in Toronto; Erika moves back. Her classes have been canceled, and she’s driving Rivette crazy. Rivette says, _If I die it won’t be from this piece of shit virus, it’ll be because I drowned myself to get away from her, she’s on TikTok now, Christ_. Frank’s grandfather dies. He was 87 and living in a home outside Longueil. Matt sends his condolences and is privately glad that his grandparents—all four of his grandparents, and his childhood guitar teacher—are dead, long dead, dead for two and six and ten years, laid to rest in the cold and uneventful ground. His mother says, “I’m glad your grandmother is dead, because this would have killed her.”

Sarah reaches out to reconcile, in light of everything that’s happening. It’s the longest March of her life, of everyone’s lives. No one in her family has gotten sick yet, but she’s sure it’s coming: she tracks the provincial and federal case counters at work and has watched them start to spike. Every hour, there are sirens. She wanted to Zoom; he negotiated her down to a phone call. “I’m still angry with you,” she says, “but I don’t want either of us to leave this earth without you knowing how much I care about you.”

“Sarah, neither of us is going anywhere,” he says.

“I just wanted you to know.” She sounds tearful. “Okay? I’m thinking of you.”

“Me too, I’m thinking of you. Be safe.”

“I’ll always love you.”

“Be safe,” he repeats; he hangs up.

Lockdown means he doesn’t see McAfee anymore, although he emails him. _Please see attached. Kindly. Regards._ He buys a dildo and 500 mL of lube online and reams himself at the same brutal pace that he used to think would tear out his guts, only this time, alone and contorted in his bed, he jerks off too and doesn’t try to hold back his moans.

The longest month drips into the worst month. Montreal begins to thaw. He texts Max. _How are you doing?_

 _Fine_ , Max says.

_Maybe you should think about coming back._

_If I leave now God knows when I’ll be able to get back to Melbourne._ Later: _Hey. Can you do me a favor?_

Anything, he thinks. _Sure_ , he writes.

 _Can you check on my mother? She isn’t answering my calls. Aunt Ginette’s sick and Julien can’t do it. He’s in America and he can’t come back._

Can’t, or won’t? The Leduc siblings are united in this, if nothing else, Matt thinks, in this fucking obstinate refusal to return to Quebec. The next morning, Saturday, he walks all the way from Mile End to Hochelaga and is reminded why.

It’s a respectable slab of pale brick, the house that Max grew up in. Once upon a time there were flowers in the window boxes. There aren’t now. He rings the bell.

Something creaks inside. “Good morning? Ms. Leduc?”

He rings it again. Max’s mother is there, peering through the peephole; he can feel her lurking. But she doesn’t let him in. She doesn’t recognize him; she thinks he’s trying to sell her something and stands behind her door screaming abuse: _Caliss de criss de marde, osti de tabarnak de sacrament._ Get out of here, you faggot. Faggot, ball eater, I’m going to beat your fucking head in.

As he leaves, he sees her through the window, disheveled, smoking a stub of a cigarette and looking agitated. Rage blurs his vision and stings his scalp. His hands itch. He’d go back and kick down the door and shout at her until she started to snivel, shake her, slap her, even; except he doesn’t want this woman to know that her son was thinking of her. He wants her to die alone choking on her own sputum. But from her screaming he knows her lungs are healthy enough.

He cools off as he walks back, head bent against the wind. Suddenly he feels leaden with pity and flushes with shame at the violence of his thoughts—about Ms. Leduc, of all people, who used to smile at him and try to sneak him cigarettes: Manon Leduc, a woman in her fifties, not even old but looking it; Max’s mother, who drove away her two sons and is completely alone on this side of the world.

These days, there are more and more people on the streets. He sees a family walking their dog, a little pug in winter boots.

 _She’s fine,_ he writes. _She misses you._

_Thanks._

That night, Max texts again. _How about you, how are you doing? Frank says you were sick for a while._

If you really cared, he thinks, you’d come home. If you really cared, you would have called me the day you landed in Melbourne, that day and every day after that. _Yeah,_ he says. _Better now, though._

Max does call. “Was it, you know…”

“No idea.” He inhales. “Fuck, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a long pause. He stares at the wall. It’s amazing, he thinks, that Max could have come out of someone like Manon, could share her blood, her features. He thinks of her as an old crone; whereas Max is an angel. He’s stained glass with a misplaced red diamond on his cheek and a voice sweeter and softer than Isigny butter.

“Matt?”

“I’m here.”

“What’d my mother really say?”

“What?”

“What’d she really—”

“Nothing.” He relents. “A whole lot of shit. But she was fine. You know. Her lungpower. It’s…”

“It’s impressive.”

“Yeah, it really is.” All he’s done this April is work and masturbate and drink. He’s drinking now. He says, “I still think you should try to come back.”

“Hey, it’s nice here.”

“Fuck’re you saying,” he says. “The whole country was on fire for months.”

“And now it isn’t.”

“Now it’s full of the plague.”

“And Montreal isn’t?” Max sounds like he’s smiling. “I’m glad you’re doing okay.”

He snorts. “Who said I was doing okay?”

Max stammers. “I thought—Frank said—Frank, uh—he said Sarah left you.”

“Oh,” he says. _Oh._ It feels as though decades have passed. He isn’t himself anymore, neither the Matt who said goodbye to Max at the airport nor the Matt who stood on the sidewalk and watched Sarah cry. At some point the world swung away and left him behind. He’s in the nightmare land where shadows go after dark and are reduced to filaments. “Fucking Christ, Max. That was five months ago. That was last year. If you were worried, you could have said something.”

“I was waiting for you to bring it up,” Max says.

“Well, here I am,” he says, “bringing it up. And I am, just like your mother, doing just fine.” He frowns as he says it, because he knows Manon Leduc is anything but fine. Centre Dollard-Cormier-University have suspended their substance abuse outpatient services over coronavirus concerns. “Fuck,” he says. “Sorry. Look. It’s been a long day. I’m going to go to bed.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll check on her again.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No one else can do it,” he says. “Maybe Shariff. But Rivette would be too scared. Frank would cry. Brass would try to fight her.”

Max chuckles. “He would. He’d lose.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, well…”

“Max,” he says. “What happened with Sarah—it wasn’t your fault.”

Another long pause. Finally, Max says, “I didn’t think it was.”

He doesn’t remember what it was like to sleep in bed beside Sarah and doesn’t miss it, but he thinks if someone kissed him now, he might cry. He resents this shutdown, which has taken from him even the rudiments of human interaction. The city lies quiet under the neon green blanket of spring buds and leaves and shoots; at this time of year there are usually people barefoot in the grass. He travels through it furtively, feeling like an intruder, shying from people, avoiding their eyes, crossing the street to dodge them. Some of them are wearing masks. It’s not much of a change from deep winter, from February, when they were all drifting around like icebergs, mummified in scarves; but Brass says it’s like a book he was reading about a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He stumbles over _post-apocalyptic_ , and Matt corrects him and grins as Brass lets loose in a voice message. _Get so very fucked, Ruiz. There’s no grammar police in the New Normal._

Still: the silence of the city doesn’t mean that love is dead. Frank, that happy bachelor, is trying to date. He’s downloaded every possible app, sent approximately seven thousand in-app messages and the same number of texts. Frank is popular, raking in the phone numbers. Wednesday: Zoom dinner and _Batman Begins_ with a girl named Celine. Thursday: the same with Beatrice, who teaches English and spends their date and the entirety of _The Dark Knight_ _Rises_ unapologetically grading essays. Friday: Louise and _The Dark Knight Returns._ Saturday: a phone call with Lea, who barely speaks French, and on Sunday, a picnic two meters apart on a park bench with Olivia, who barely speaks at all. He kisses her anyway; he likes her, it’s clearly mutual. She ghosts him a week later.

 _I’ll never find love_ , Frank complains.

Brass: _did you seriously watch the entire fucking batman trilogy? With three different chicks?? Without me???_

 _Try Grindr_ , Rivette suggests.

He downloads Grindr—panics—deletes it—downloads it again. In an instant, his inbox is full of dicks. He puts nothing in his own profile. He learns that the bathhouses are still closed but gloryholes are back. He goes back to the dicks and imagines them in him: short, skinny, fat, cut and uncut. How they will feel. The stretch. The drag.

The dildo he bought from Eros is bright blue and velvety to the touch, absolutely pleasurable to use but easily mistaken for some kind of installation piece meant to sit on a pedestal in Place des Arts. He fucks himself again while staring at a particularly veiny specimen, then lies in bed scrolling and scrolling until he hits the limit. He ignores the brunettes with soft smiling eyes and combs through the profiles that are just decapitated torsos, looking for McAfee, who isn’t there.

He closes the app. Cleans up. It’s morning in Melbourne. He texts Max. _G’day mate._

_Hey._

_Holding up okay?_

_Tell you the truth, I’ve been better._

_Man, fuck this fucking virus,_ Frank breaks in, in the group chat. _I fucking miss you guys._

Rivette: _I’ve been thinking. The limit on gatherings is what, 10? Why don’t you come north? Join the Rivette Bubble. You don’t even have to come inside, you can camp._

Frank: _Fucking rude, man. It’s cold up there. Of course we’re fucking coming inside._

_Well, I didn’t want to assume._

_Wish I could come_ , Max says. Matt can hear the wistfulness; it reaches around the world and takes his heart in its fist.

Brass: _Max we’ll prop you up on an ipad, no problem bro._

 _Erika…_ , he reminds them.

 _Fucking fun killer Matt_ , Brass replies _. Are you coming or what. Rivette Bubble. Rivette Bubble. Rivette Bubble!_

Frank takes up the chant. _Rivette Bubble!_

The summer house is still in winter; the temperature hovers at 8 degrees the whole weekend. He trades the waterbed for the sofa-bed in the study and plows stubbornly through his work, fending off Martine Rivette’s offers of tea and coffee and homemade fudge. She gives them each a four-pack of scented hand sanitizers. Alone in the study, he sniffs them: lilac, lavender, fresh laundry, and teakwood. He can hear the others throughout the day, shrieking, laughing. At five o’clock they go down to the lake and throw rocks into its frigid depths. Brass sends Max pictures.

“Why don’t you just post them later,” he says, when Brass grumbles that he’s reached his data limit, fucking Rogers. “On Instagram or whatever the fuck.”

But Brass says he can’t do that. His aunts follow him on Instagram, and he doesn’t want to get lectured again; it’s bad enough that he was still going to work in March and April, exposing their older sister to untold harm and risk.

“Yeah, but you had to.”

“Yup.” Brass strikes a pose. “Someone’s gotta stock those shelves.”

They go back to the house, wiping their muddy hands on their pants. Erika is recording in the living room. “Yeah, but like, it’s like, so fucking bad right now?” she says. “Like, okay, protest if you can, that’s important, but otherwise hashtag stay home, you know?” She pivots so they aren’t in the background of her video, shuffling guiltily indoors.

“Badmouthing us on the internet again?” Rivette says.

“Uh, newsflash, Marc-Antoine, people are _dying_?” She tosses her hair. “Other places are doing a good job of containing this fucking thing. Like, New Zealand doesn’t even have any cases right now? Meanwhile we’re over here pretty much, like, licking each other? It’s fucking terrible?”

Frank clears his throat and looks down; just last week he was licking Olivia.

“Always wanted to go to New Zealand,” Brass says.

She looks at him pityingly. “They wouldn’t let you in.”

That night, he can’t sleep. He has a nightmare about the lake, about finding Max at the bottom, weighted down with the stones they threw. He wakes up at six and finds Erika in the kitchen, crying. He remembers her when she was twelve, trailing after them, then running; falling, skinning her knees—bawling in a heap in the dirt. Max was the one who sat with her then.

“Erika? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Matisse,” she says. “He hooked up with someone last night. After the protest. Without _any_ protection. And like. That’s _so_ irresponsible? I told him. He’s going to get people killed.”

“Matisse has HIV?” he says, baffled.

“What?” She glares at him. “ _No_ , Matt, he could have the virus! Or like catch it and give it to someone! He wore a mask when he was marching, but he took it off afterward to suck face. I mean, you can’t have sex standing two meters apart, can you? I asked him how he could even live with himself after that. Knowing he could have killed someone. Now he isn’t talking to me.” Her eyes well over. “I have 2,000 followers on TikTok but I’d give them all up like yesterday just to have my best friend back.” Quaver. “You know?”

Bathhouses and gloryholes, he thinks. He thinks he can understand Matisse’s point of view. It’s been three months since he had sex; he’s been so isolated that the sight of Frank and Brass actually turned him on when they came to pick him up on Friday—the sight of fucking Brass, of all people, fuck. He’d looked at them like they were strangers, torsos on Grindr. Their two young athletic bodies, their soft hair, the smell of them, of different shampoos and deodorants—he’d felt his tongue prickling with saliva. If either of them had touched him—

“He’ll come around,” he says. Thank shitting Christ he isn’t feeling anything toward Erika but fraternal compassion, as cute as she is right now, bare-faced and weepy in her pajamas. “Maybe he’s ashamed. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

She sniffs. “You’re being nice. Why’re you being so nice?”

“Am I?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Personal growth?” he says. He makes himself coffee. When he sits down to drink it, Erika changes chairs to sit beside him.

“How’s Max?” she asks, eventually. She puts her hand on his forearm and he blinks down at it, at the glossy orange fingernails.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just curious.” Her voice is small. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“He’s okay.” They were texting last night, teasing each other, watching YouTube videos together. He tries not to think about Max in the lake, blue-faced under the water, his eyes dull, his birthmark luridly purple, almost black.

“He’s so lucky,” Erika says. She pulls away. She huddles in her chair. “They’re controlling it so fucking well in Australia. I wish I was there. I wish I could just, like, leave everything behind and teleport.”

He thinks, _Me too._

“I lost my job,” Max says.

Before he even opens his mouth he’s reaching for his laptop, jostling his mouse. The screen lights up. _CQLR c A-19.1, art. 113 (2) 16.1, an Act pertaining to land use and development._ He clucks at it and closes the tab. Sets his Skype status to Do Not Disturb. “I’ll call my father,” he says. “Is there an employment office? Over there? You know I helped Frank…piece of shit site crashed ten times, but we got it done.”

“Thanks,” Max says quietly. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Are you okay? Fuck,” he says, “of course you aren’t. Sorry. I’m an idiot. Is this going to affect your visa?”

“I don’t know,” Max says again. “Don’t think I ever told you about my job.”

“Yeah?” He Googles it: Australia unemployment. Headlines roll in. _2.09 million Australians unemployed._ _First recession in 29 years. Australia’s boom is over._ The seventh link takes him to the right page. “Fuck,” he says. _Câlice._ “There are residence requirements. I don’t think you qualify. Hey, maybe you can apply for CERB.”

“What’s that?” Max sounds more like himself now, even a little bit curious. “ _Cahh-liss-uh_ ,” he says. “Go back to France, you imperialist.”

“Eat shit,” Matt says. “I’m trying to help you here. CERB’s the uh, the aid package. For Canadians.”

“Don’t I have to be in Canada for that?”

“Well, let me find out.” He doesn’t say: _You could come back._

“It was a pub, technically,” Max says.

“Hmm?” He’s scrolling through the CERB page. It’s busy, it’s busy. Red exclamation point icons everywhere.

“The place where I was working,” Max says. “Barry’s Pub. Steak and kidney pies. Pimm’s cups. Fish and chips on the waterfront. Every night I came home reeking of—”

“No change from usual.”

“—haddock. Dick. Tourists liked it. Now they’re all gone.”

He imagines the waterfront. He remembers the gulls. “What’s a Pimm’s cup?”

“It’s a drink. Come on, you know what it is.”

“Max, I have no idea.”

“Pimm’s liqueur, lemon juice. Ginger ale. Mint, cucumber, strawberry, lemon, orange.”

“So, a fucking fruit salad. What else did you make?”

“Man, everything. When I close my eyes now, all I see are rows and rows of bottles.”

His eyes have been closed since the beginning of Max’s recitation of Pimm’s cup components. In the glazed red darkness behind his eyelids, he joins Max behind the bar, beside the bottles. Max turns to look at him.

He opens his eyes to the knife-glare of mid-June sunshine. “It says you need to be living here,” he says. “But you know, we can fudge it. You could use Rivette’s address. You’re practically a Rivette at this point. Or a Ruiz. I know Maman would vouch for you.”

“Christ,” Max says, after a brief silence. “Are you suggesting we commit employment insurance fraud, Matt? From your office? From your office, where you are a lawyer, Matthias François Javier Ruiz?”

“We’re all working from home now,” he tells Max. “So no one will hear our evil plans, _Maxime_. Unless the walls are thinner than I thought.”

“You should test them. Yodel.”

Oh, I’ve been yodeling, he thinks. I haven’t seen my neighbors in twelve weeks; I thought it was because of the pandemic, but maybe they’re avoiding me, the lonely pervert in 306.

Max yodels for him. “My housemate left,” he explains. “Left the state. Went to stay with her parents in Tasmania. At least she’s still paying her half of the rent.”

“Max, I think…”

“I know what you think,” Max says. “There’s nothing for me in Quebec.” He hisses. “I mean, there’s no job for me.”

“There are jobs.”

“Doesn’t matter how many drinks I can make if the bars are all closed.”

“There are _other_ jobs. Look, I’ll find you one. Right now.” He pulls them all up: Indeed.ca, Jobs.ca, Monster, LinkedIn. He hates the sudden flatness of Max’s voice. “Worst case scenario, you can join Brass at the IGA.”

“Pretty sure they blacklisted me after I knocked over that display of premium olive oil in Sec 4.”

“Provigo, then. The 7 fucking 11. There are jobs, Max.”

“Shouldn’t you be lawyering right now?”

“Don’t hang up,” he exclaims. He repeats himself, softer. “Don’t.”

A pause, a breath. When Max speaks again he sounds dazed. “I wasn’t going to.”

He reads Max the descriptions from Emploi Québec. It turns out Provigo is actually hiring, nearly thirty spots in stores across the island. “You could be a meat clerk.”

“No thanks.”

“A delivery driver.”

“I’d have to learn how to drive.”

“You could clean air ducts.”

“The fuck, Matt,” Max says, startled into laughter.

“That’s what it says. Air duct cleaner. I bet they dress you up like Tom Cruise.” What a reversal of themselves, he thinks, in this year where everything is upside-down. Here he is, joyless Matthias, humming the Mission Impossible theme, grinning and trying to get Max to grin too, wide enough until he can hear it in his voice. His inbox pings. “Oh, shitting fuck.”

“What is it?”

“A client. Just another construction company trying to get around zoning laws.”

“The bastards,” Max says. “What do they want now?”

“The moon. So they can build a hotel on it.”

“Tell me more.”

“You can’t possibly want to hear more about this.”

“No, tell me.”

“Client confidentiality, Max.”

“I thought you said no one could hear you.”

“You asked for it.” He reopens the tab on land use. “Chapter A dash nineteen point one,” he reads. “Article one hundred and thirteen, section two, subsection sixteen point one…”

Later—it can’t be all that much later—he realizes that Max has gone quiet. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. He imagines him, curled on his side, dark hair trailing across the pillow. He listens closely: soft panting breaths.

He whispers. “Max?”

“I’m here,” Max gasps. “I’m here, I’m listening.”

“I think I’m boring you to death.”

Max says, ragged, “You aren’t.”

“Max—”

“Don’t stop.”

He inhales. Max is gasping in his ear. He tries to read the next subsection, but the words are swimming in front of him, rearranging themselves. The backlit screen seems to burn his eyes. His heart is pounding. His mouth says, “Max, Christ. Max—fuck, Max.”

He thinks back to that night at Shariff’s: Max in his arms, Max pressed against him. The flicker of his eyelashes. The sugar-salt of his lips. His tongue. He jams his phone against his ear, jams Max against his ear, holds him there with his shoulder—fumbles toward the waistband of his sweatpants with both hands and remembers what it was like to have Max’s hand there, cupping him, in that last thundering heartbeat before he wrenched himself away. He wants to kiss Max’s face. His hands are in his pants, worming under his briefs. He’s burning hot between his fingers. His phone starts to slide and he crushes it against his shoulder.

His chair shakes. The table shakes. He gives his balls a squeeze. “ _Max_.”

Max whimpers. The call drops. He doubles over, bangs his forehead on his keyboard, and comes.

He thinks about the way he has loved Max—gently, amorphously, like an extension of his soul. Now, suddenly, it’s concrete. Now it’s excruciating. And it was always there under the surface, this pain; he thinks, this is why I grew up expressionless and dark and gaunt, I am worn out with it, hollowed out by hopeless love. But he knows the thought is disingenuous, a lie he’s built up over the years. Because it was never hopeless: Max was always there with his hands outstretched, ready to meet him halfway, ready even if he wasn’t ready. He remembers last September, how he threw himself in the lake and tried to swim away from it. But sinking himself in deep cold water hadn’t been enough; he had drowned nothing, doused nothing. Now he sits up. Wriggles out of his sweatpants; wipes himself clean. Balls up his underwear and throws it into the corner.

When he jiggles his mouse again to awaken his laptop from sleep, he sees that his forehead has drafted a reply email full of gibberish. A keyboard smash, all id. Between the stray numbers and letters, he reads the name written on his heart.

He laughs. Rubs his mouth, pensive. He can smell himself on his fingers, taste himself. He texts Max, left-handed. _If LégisQuébec turns you on that much, maybe you should consider a law degree._

There are a hundred different things Max could say in response. Sorry, I got carried away. Sorry, that was gross of me (but you didn’t hang up), weird of me (but you went along with it). Sorry in general. Or: we should talk. Or never speak of this again. Or: silence.

Max is typing, Whatsapp tells him. He holds his breath, and Max says, _Maybe I should._

He flushes, heat radiating steadily along his cheekbones until it hits his ears. The back of his neck burns like someone’s reached over and slapped it. Yes, he thinks. You should. You should listen to me. Listen to me and come home.

_I’ll help you study._

_Alors, how could I say no after such a generous offer? I’m going to go to bed now._

_I’m going to write five hundred emails. After I wash my hands._

_Poor you._

_Poor me. Sleep tight._

The first of July: Moving Day. He works until noon, then travels three stops west to join Rivette and Frank on a terrasse. They drink and sweat under an umbrella that won’t stay still, twisting and pirouetting, spinning and spinning. Exasperated, he jumps up to grab it.

On the seventh of July, Melbourne locks down again. Their case count is spiking and spiking. So is Montreal’s, but the people outside don’t seem to care anymore. They go to work, they go to protest, and, presumably, they fuck. They sit in the sunshine, in the parks, on the terrasses, beneath their uncooperative, rotating umbrellas, drinking sangria. _Don’t worry,_ Max tells him, _Aunt Ginette’s helping me; don’t worry, I got a job making deliveries._

In July, whenever Max calls, he always sounds breathless. “Are you busy?”

He remembers Erika, tearful in the morning gloom of the Rivette kitchen. _You can’t have sex standing two meters apart, can you?_

Can’t you? he thinks. Try 17,000 kilometers, Erika.

“No,” he says.

“No meetings?”

“Just one,” he says. “Right now. With you.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.”

“Mm.”

“Tell me what you’re doing,” he says.

Max stutters. He loves it. “T-touching myself, _osti de marde_ ,” Max gasps. “Thinking about you.”

He’s thinking about Max, too, about how long his hair must be now—five or six months without ever encountering a pair of scissors, unless he’s been trimming it himself. He has FaceTime on that iPad of his, the iPad they gave him, but he’s never let Matt see, he refuses to video call, so instead, as always, he sustains himself with his prodigious memory. In secondary, they all wore their hair long and shaggy. Frank, of course, never stopped, and he looked then as he does now, cute and curly-haired. Shariff they hadn’t met yet. Rivette’s hair was pin-straight and luminous; he was constantly being mistaken for Erika from behind. And he and Max looked like two little boys from the Mediterranean, himself like an Alexandrian mummy portrait, Max like a cherub hovering in the background of a dimly lit fresco.

He had his first real haircut in months on Tuesday—the barber started with clippers, dry—strands of hair fell to the ground and carpeted it like moss. He imagines taking a curl of Max’s hair, wrapping it around his finger. Tugging.

When the office reopens and he sees McAfee again, he thinks they might fuck right there on the floor. It’s Saturday night and no one else is around; the handful of young associates who were there in the morning are long gone, and Mr. Courtemanche is still working from home, at the request of his wife. But McAfee pulls him into a conference room first.

“Molly’s pregnant,” he says.

“Oh—congratulations,” he says. He’s bemused. He raises his eyebrows at McAfee: _Why are you telling me this?_

“I’m pregnant too,” McAfee says. “Just a teensy-weensy bit pregnant.” He sniggers and pats his belly.

True enough: McAfee’s put on some weight. He’s not as angular as he was before, his edges softer, and he feels solid when he bends Matt over, an immovable force, not that Matt is trying to move him. He shivers and grips the table, panting into his mask, which flutters damply against his lips. McAfee doesn’t comment on the ease of entry. Maybe he takes it for granted. Everything’s been easy for McAfee, he thinks, from the day he was born. And for me too, except I keep getting in my own way. He thinks of Max, the little baby with a port-wine stain, struggling for weeks to survive in the NICU. His mother told him the story, which was told to her by Manon Leduc, in the years when Manon was still trying to get clean. How when she would reach inside the incubator, little Max would grip her finger.

“So this is it,” he says. “The last time. For us.”

“What?” McAfee says. After flushing the condom, he’s back from the washroom, whistling, straightening his tie while his mask dangles from one ear. “Last time? Oh—because of the baby? Nah, come on, Ruiz.”

“No,” he says, “not because of the baby. Because I met someone. _Have_ someone. Special.”

“No kidding?” McAfee says slowly, staring at him. “During quarantine? Ruiz, you sly dog.” He closes and locks the conference room door again and starts to loosen his tie. “Wish you’d said something before we got down to business.”

“Why?” He tries to retreat and bumps against the table. “What are you doing?”

“Last time and all,” McAfee says. He touches Matt’s hand. His fingertips caress the divots between Matt’s knuckles and slide away; then he crouches and sinks gracefully to his knees. “I owe you one anyway. For your birthday. Whenever the fuck that is.”

Time has been unraveling for months. It pulls together—he knits it back together, with effort—in that July. The commute helps. They eye one another on the train, the people in masks, the people not in masks. After a week he stops paying attention. Frank gets a job in the IT department of the international accounting firm that shares their office tower, thanks to him, Matt, Frank says, though all he did was mention it to Mr. Courtemanche, who knows someone who knows someone. So sometimes they get lunch, and he can only buy when Frank lets him. He sees the question in McAfee’s eyes when McAfee sees them strolling out together: so this is the guy, huh, you broke it off for this hippie-looking kid? When you walk next to each other there’s a wall of space between you. He grins at McAfee and feels like he’s grimacing.

Over sandwiches, they talk about Frank’s dating life—abandoned—about Frank’s new dog, a rescue. It’s a mutt with a spot over one eye, named Malajube. They talk around Max, obliquely, grunting again: every solo conversation with Frank these days seems to take place in the past, the hour after they said goodbye to Max, on the sidewalk in the Plateau, Frank’s engine running in the background, their eye contact minimal and awkward. Frank hit him hard when they fought at Shariff’s; Frank was angry, he didn’t pull his punches. Even now, in the civilized ambiance of Zibo!, he feels the reverberation of Frank’s fist against his jaw.

So he mentions Max carefully, though he can’t resist grumbling. “He didn’t call me for three months after he arrived, did you know that?”

It was longer than that, of course, but he doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t want to say it out loud in case Frank thinks there was some new schism. We parted on good terms, he thinks, at the airport. Didn’t we?

Frank looks down. Frank says, “He asked me not to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“And Rivette.”

“What?”

“He sold the iPad,” Frank says. “To cover his security deposit. For his apartment. They call it a bond over there.”

“Fucking Christ.” He waits while Frank takes a bite out of his Reuben, then another. “Fuck.”

“So I think he was worried,” Frank says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “That you’d ask him why he wasn’t using it. And then he’d have to tell you. And then you’d…”

“I’d what,” he says. “Get mad?”

“Make him come back. Or something.”

So he waited six months, he thinks. Until he thought it was safe? Until he thought we’d forgotten about it, the iPad? Or about him? Max doesn’t understand how my mother’s mind works, he thinks. When she gives a gift she forgets about it. Because it was never hers. When she buys a gift for you, it is yours from the moment she thinks to give it to you, no matter how long it sits in her cupboard in the interim. And the moment it leaves her hands, it is gone. You could do whatever you wanted with it, even throw it into the sea. Then he thinks: oh. So it was that important to him. He treasured it so much; he was so ashamed.

“He should have called me,” he says.

“Yeah. I told him to. But.” Frank looks uneasy, changes the subject.

On Sunday, the second of August, New Zealand marks 100 days without any new local cases. On the phone, Max says this is a good thing. It shows that it can be done. If the people are steady. If the people are committed to one another and to the good of society.

“Only in New Zealand,” he says. “ _Crisse de câlice_ , Max, only in New Zealand. Aren’t there five times as many sheep as people? Ten times as many? And how do they plan to maintain it, while the rest of the world is infected? They’re going to be like _Dinotopia_.” They loved those books as kids, Max especially: he named his skybax Genghis Khan. He hears Max laugh. “Don’t laugh, I’m serious. That’s them. _Dinotopia_. The land apart from time. They’re going to have to stay locked up for years. And the virus—”

The virus will be back. It doesn’t respect human law, human superstition, doesn’t quiver and lose heart at sight of a piece of cloth like a demon recoiling from a brandished crucifix. It will be back, again and again, until there is a vaccine. And even then, there is no guarantee of victory. And also: they shouldn’t talk about it this way, as though it is a war. The Americans like to do this, declare war on concepts. We shouldn’t imitate them, he thinks; the cost of the collateral damage is too high, we can’t pay it.

“I think the idea is,” Max says, “if Australia can do it, they can form a bubble.” He’s still laughing. “The place with all the deadly animals and the place with all the friendly ones. But no dinosaurs. I think.”

“It’s not going to work,” he says. “There are going to be loopholes. There are going to be cracks. They will have to shut down again and again.”

“You’re such a lawyer,” Max says.

“You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that these measures will fail,” he says. “Or a doctor. Both of us, we work with people. I work with other lawyers. You work with tourists. We know what people are like.”

“Matt, people aren’t evil.”

“I didn’t say they were. Just human.” And they want to live, he thinks. They want to be free. They want to kiss their lovers and get married and see their children off to school, without being judged, without being fined, without being called killers. “Come back,” he says. “Things are going back to normal here, the bars are reopening, you can get a job.”

“I have a job here,” Max says, and, “Well, better get back to it.”

Two days later, there are four new cases of coronavirus in New Zealand. Victoria declares a “state of disaster,” and metropolitan Melbourne reverts to Stage 4 lockdown. He feels a sense of disbelief, of being caged in, even though he spent last night at a bar with his coworkers, talking shop, talking shit. He feels Max drifting farther and farther away from him, receding, as if on an ice floe.

Max says, “You were right.”

They’re talking every day now, every night. _Don’t you have deliveries to make?_ he asks, and Max explains, my hours were cut. He offers to have his father _make_ Max a job, an essential one, a salaried one, one with benefits. Never mind that Ronaldo’s business is doing badly, that he’s had to let people go. He offers to send Max money. To buy him video games, books, things to occupy his time. But he doesn’t offer to buy Max a plane ticket, because asking Max to come back makes Max go quiet; it makes Max remember that he has something to do, somewhere to be. Where? he thinks. Where do you have to be? Some other corner of your apartment? The edge of the perimeter you are allowed to walk around your neighborhood, when you aren’t working? If you come home, he thinks, I will hold you so tenderly. I will cradle your face between my hands. I will kiss your lips. I will show you how much you are loved.

They talk so much that weekend that it’s like they’re in the same room, like Max is beside him, so it’s a shock when Monday comes and Max disappears. He disappears so thoroughly it’s like a hole opened in the floor and swallowed him up, and closed after him, too, so that when Matt turns to say something he finds himself alone, staring at a blank wall.

Their friends are no help. No one in the group chat has heard from Max in a week. And he thinks they’re telling the truth; he thinks this time Frank isn’t trying to cover for anyone. He calls his father. His mother calls a woman she knows in Sydney. Shariff finds the telephone numbers of the restaurants where Max worked, the Barry’s Pub and the Joy Luck Buffet before it, but no one answers; no one knows. Frank, grim-faced, calls the hospitals. Rivette calls his mother, who calls the number Max gave her: it goes to Max’s housemate, a girl named Michaela Sanderson, who says she’ll ask around but she isn’t sure what she can do, she’s in Tasmania after all.

He looks at flights. Books one. Goes to the airport only to get turned around; he doesn’t have the right paperwork. He calls Mr. Courtemanche but Mr. Courtemanche doesn’t know anyone this time, and what’s more, Mr. Courtemanche is shocked: Australia? Now? It’s a family emergency, he says. He turns back to the desk. He shouts, but the face of Air Canada does not waver, though the lift of her brow is sympathetic above her mask. Air Canada is so sorry, but there is nothing they can do. They apologize for the inconvenience Mr. Ruiz has faced, for which Mr. Ruiz will receive, not a refund, but a flight credit. We could petition the government, Brass says later; we could write a letter to Legault.

On Thursday, Max resurfaces, mildly apologetic. There was a problem with his phone. It ran out of battery. It’s still acting up; so if he disappears again, don’t worry. He can’t get it fixed right now, because you know.

He unleashes a string of Quebecois profanity that would make Brass proud. When he’s finished, his voice is cracking. He says, “Osti de sacrament de tabarnak, we thought you were dead.”

We called Michaela, he says.

“Mickey? You did?” Max sounds surprised. “She’s long gone.” And all of a sudden, he pieces it together: that the problem was not with Max’s phone but with his electricity, which has been cut off. All of a sudden, he can see the shape of Max’s week: the darkness, the realization, the panic resolving into resignation, the clandestine search for a place to charge his phone in a world where all cafes, libraries, and shelters have closed; but he found it, eventually, with an unguarded outlet at a gas station or grocery store, or a neighbor who took pity on him.

What about your job, the delivery job, he starts to ask, but then he understands that, too, that Max was lying. There was never another job after Barry’s Pub, and Aunt Ginette has no idea about the trouble her nephew is in, not the faintest suspicion. She thinks he’s surfing on the beach, Julien 2.0, wind in his hair, money in his wallet, money for his mother that he’s decided not to send.

“ _Christ_ , Max.”

Max shrugs it off. He says, defiantly, “It’s not like I’m not used to it.”

He thinks: I have never felt anger like this before. He lets it carry him, a white-hot obliterating wave. “I offered to send you money,” he says. “I offered, _tabarnak_. Why didn’t you take it? Why won’t you take it?” Why won’t you take anything from me, when all I want, the only thing I want right now in this godforsaken fucked up timeline, is to give you everything I have? “Take it,” he says. “Take the money or I’ll never speak to you again.”

“I don’t want your money,” Max says.

“Mother of God,” he says, “mother of God, by the three virgins, fucking shitting fuck, then why won’t you come home?” He doesn’t raise his voice, the way he raised it at the Air Canada counter; his voice is level, icy. He’s making an argument before some great cosmic arbitral judge; Max is opposing counsel, Max is no match for him. “What’s so great about the way things are now?” he asks. “Why do you insist on being trapped there, like a prisoner, _in the dark_ , far away from everyone who cares about you?” Far away from _me_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t say it because it’s pathetic, because he wants to be logical, because he doesn’t want to start crying. “Answer me—why?”

“Fucking fuck, Matt,” Max whispers, “you know why.”

At the airport, saying goodbye, with Frank stepping away, turning his back to them like a supportive chaperone or a kindhearted warden who tells his prisoners that they change the guard on the watchtower at midnight and for five minutes, six, the yard is unwatched, the south wall is crumbling and oh what a pity they don’t have the budget to shore it up—with Max gazing up at him, holding his hands, he said, “But. Sarah.”

He had meant: give me time, give me a month, to let her down gently, to do it in a way that doesn’t make her suspect that I am doing this for you. Because I could not bear to have her know this about me. Because this secret is for us and us alone. And for Frank over there, waiting patiently, his hair blowing in the autumn breeze.

And Max had said, “Of course. Sarah.”

And Max had hugged him. And he had felt the way their bodies fit together. And he had said goodbye. And Frank had taken this as his cue and turned around with a mist of tears in his eyes, taking the two of them into his arms and clasping their hands, joining them, like he was ready to marry them, then and there.

He wants to howl. Trust Max to misunderstand. Trust Max to think he was being set aside again and not even try to fight it. Trust Max to efface himself, to be complicit in his own erasure, so certain of the measure of his own worthlessness, of an innate unlovability. And trust himself, Matthias, to make a mare’s nest of what should have been the simplest of things: the simplest, the most straightforward.

“Max, I love you,” he says. “I love you, I love you, please come home.”

Max just breathes. Breathes and breathes, and he can hear him, the wet catch of those breaths. Then Max inhales. Then Max says, “Me too. Me too, I love you. Fuck. I love you so much.”

“I’ll send you money for the ticket,” he says. “I’ll buy it for you.”

“Don’t. Don't.”

“Max—”

“I’ll come home,” Max says, and he exhales and stops, surprised; he hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. “I promise. I have to go now. I have to call Aunt Ginette.”

“Call Madame Rivette too,” he says. “She’s out of her mind with worry.”

“I will.”

“I love you.”

Max makes a noise: a snort, a huff, of disbelief, of exasperation. He knows why. If it’s so easy for him to say, he could have said it sooner; should have said it sooner, much sooner, and saved them all some grief. “I love you too,” Max says, and hangs up.

In a few days it will be September: a year since Max left. A year in exile, which is long enough, he thinks, to reflect, to repent. Too long. At work, he reads the Australian newspapers. He knows the Melbourne eviction ban is ending, though all sides are clamoring for an extension and are likely to get it. In Montreal, there have been protests, over police brutality, over the separation of families by the unfeeling state. At least they have this, he thinks, at least they have citizenship, legal status, and Max won’t be turned away at the border; he’ll be welcomed, rather, the prodigal Canadian son.

As for Max, he vanishes again, like he said he might. He knows Max is working hard, thinking hard, but he can’t help but imagine him sitting on the floor in the blue-black darkness of his apartment, small, hunched, his arms around his knees. He goes to sleep thinking of Max and wakes up thinking of him, of the warm rustle of Max’s hair when Max hugged him, tucking himself under his ear. In that moment outside Pierre Elliott Trudeau there was no one else in the world.

On August 30, Max calls. He’s coming back. He can’t find another job, and his working visa, his temporary Covid-19 hardship visa, is about to expire. He’s booked a flight from Melbourne to Montreal, 39 hours and two stops. Julien bought it for him, with his credit card. “I’ll be paying him back for the next twenty years,” Max jokes.

He’s briefly angry. He swears. Why is Max _like_ this, why won’t Max fucking let him help? He offers to cover half of it, a quarter, ten percent; to pay Julien off completely, but Max refuses.

But:

“They’re going to ask me if I have a place I can stay,” Max says. His voice is hesitant. Soft. “For fourteen days. I can’t leave the house. And I can’t stay with her—with—I can’t do it.”

“I know—you’re coming to stay with me,” he says. “Do you have a pen?” And he waits. And Max says yes. And he gives the address.

September 2nd. An indoor plant, a four-leafed variegated minima, has sold for 8,150 dollars in New Zealand. Brass sends the article. It’s an old joke between them that he can’t distinguish between New Zealand and Australia. Frank reacts with an exploding head emoji. Shariff, who could probably afford one, and Rivette, who could have two, say nothing; possibly they’re still asleep. Softly, carefully, he records a voice message. _Jesus fucking Christ._ Frank writes back: _Why’re you whispering, bro?_

He sets his phone down. He turns it over. It’s Wednesday morning, the sun is shining, Max is asleep in his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked, please [reblog](https://hallo-catfish.tumblr.com/post/628466479783936000/miss-you-like-a-home-zetaophiuchi-ryuujitsu)!


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